“You think they’d go after her?”
“They’d be fools right now if they did. And I don’t think they’re fools. I think they’d like to know a lot more about her operations than they know. I think they lose a lot of sleep wondering whether someday we’ll turn tables, make an understanding with Earth, and go after them. Earth trying to get a foothold back in space, establishing new starstations… in other directions… they view that with great suspicion.”
“Do you think Earth might become a problem?”
“We don’t think so currently. But after the War, when we couldn’t get a peace to stick… you aren’t old enough to remember. But we spacefarers had been homogenous so long we flatly had forgotten how to deal with divergent views, contrary interests, traders that we are. One thing old Earth is good at: diplomacy.”
“Good at it!” He couldn’t restrain himself. “Their diplomacy started the War!”
“Not on their territory,” Madison said with a nasty smile. “The War never got to them, did it? When we and Union chased Mazian’s tail back to Sol space and we lost him, it looked as if we were going to square off with the Union carrier… Earth mediated that little matter. We frankly didn’t know what hit us. First thing we knew, we agreed, the Union commander agreed, each of us separately with Earth; then we had to agree with each other or Earth would have flung us at each other and watched the show from a distance. Learn from that. It’s all those governments, all those cultures on one world. They’re canny about settling differences. And we’d forgotten the knack. Four, five thousand years of planetary squabbles have to teach you something useful, I suppose.” Madison folded up his input board and tucked the handheld into his operations jacket, preparing to leave. “I don’t know if we could have made peace without Earth.”
“Would we have made war without them, sir? In your opinion.
“Far less likely, too. We’d have been an adjunct of what’s now at Union. But James Robert would have spit in their eye, still, when they tried to nationalize the merchanters. We’d have fought them. We’d have had every merchanter in space on our side. As we did. And we’d still have gained sovereignty on our own decks. As we did. Think about it. It’s all we merchanters ever really gained from all the fighting we ever did. I just don’t think we’d have blown Mariner doing it.”
A Union spy had sabotaged a station—this station. Mariner. Pell had lost a dock during the War. Mariner had depressurized all around the ring, and tens of thousands of people who hadn’t made it to sealed shelter had died. It was the worst human disaster that had happened outside of Earth. Ever.
And, we merchanters . It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone on Finity use that particular we . Or talk about a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss in the War. It was a sobering notion, that the War wasn’t just the War, immutable, always there. There’d been a before. Was it possible there would be an after—and that they wouldn’t have gained a damned thing by all they’d done, all the blood they’d shed?
Was it true, that even if you shoved at history and fought and struggled with its course, the universe still did what it was going to do anyway?
Hell if.
He couldn’t accept that.
Madison went on his way to the bridge, needed there, and he went his.
He hadn’t found his way past Madison’s reticence to ask what no one had yet told him… the reason they’d split from Mallory, which he began to think held all the other answers. No better informed than before he’d snagged the second captain, JR picked up his own handheld and clipped it to a belt that did little else but hold it—a great deal like the pistol he’d once worn, back in the bad old days when fifteen-year-olds had gone armed everywhere on the ship.
They’d stopped doing that when they’d gotten through the business with Earth and when it was sure they’d moved Mazian’s raiders out of the shipping lanes. What the likes of Africa and Europe had done when they boarded a merchanter didn’t bear telling their younger crew, but he’d grown up with a pistol on his hip and instructions how to use it in corridors where you had to worry about a pressure blowout.
At fifteen he’d been instructed to blow out the corridor where he was himself if his only other prospect had been capture by the Fleet.
Helluva way to grow up, he supposed. It was the only life he’d known. And when they’d gotten past the worst of the mop-up, and when they could go through a jump-point without being on high alert—then the Old Man had called the guns in, and arranged that they’d be in lockers here and there about the ship, with no latch on the cabinets (nothing on Finity was locked), but not to be carried again. He’d felt scared when they’d taken the guns away. It had taken him this long to get over being scared.
And they hadn’t ever had to use them. Their in-ship stand-down from arms had lasted and the Old Man had been right.
Maybe this stand-down from arms would last, too, and maybe he needed to bear down harder on the study of Viking fish farms.
Laundry wasn’t anybody’s favorite assignment. After-jump meant a load of sweaty clothes. But it was better, Jeremy had said, than drawing the duty after liberty, because there was no limit to how many outfits somebody could get dirty on a two-week liberty, and there was a limit to how many clothes anybody totally tranked out could get dirty during jump. So they had the light end of things, and consequently they’d washed everything they had in the bins inside four hours. The better and worse of such assignments was a detail of spacer life Fletcher had never quite, somehow, imagined as potentially an item of curiosity and least of all his problem.
But he’d learned how to manage his personal property, on this particular detail. He’d learned, for instance, that by rules and regulations you left your last work clothes for cleaning in the laundry on your way out to liberty, like at Pell, and whoever got next laundry duty (it couldn’t be them, because the computer never doubled you on the same assignment) did all of it as they’d done, on the run out from dock.
So there were rhythms to the jobs they did. The laundry didn’t always operate at the mad pace it had the last time. It was a burst of activity in this particular period, and then last-minute special cleaning for officers’ uniforms.
He learned, for instance, that a crew member on Finity had an issue of clothing of which at least one dress and one work outfit stayed in the locker ready for board-call and undock schedules or a senior officer talked seriously to you about your wardrobe. A regular crew member took only flash stuff and civvies ashore on a liberty, and wasn’t allowed to wear work stuff on dock unless he was working, which junior-juniors didn’t have to do.
“So what if you wear work clothes?” he asked Jeremy as Jeremy worked beside him, having given him this piece of information. “Another talk with an officer?”
“Why don’t you try it?” Vince asked from behind his back.
That was at least the third snide and uninvited remark. Vince was still on him about the drink from the bar last main-dark, from what he could figure; somehow that really bothered Vince.
“After all,” Vince said, “you don’t have to follow the rules. Not you.”
“Cut it out,” Jeremy said
“Vince,” Linda said
“Well, he didn’t, did he?”